Generation of knowledge-acquisition tools from domain ontologies

Metalevel tools can support the software development process by automating the design of taskand application-speci c tools. Dash is a metalevel tool that allows developers to generate domain-speci c knowledge-acquisition tools from domain ontologies. Domain specialists use the knowledge-acquisition tools generated by dash to instantiate the concepts and relationships de ned in the domain ontologies. The output of the knowledge-acquisition tools is a collection of instances that constitute the knowledge base for a knowledge-based system. To automate the generation of appropriate tools, the dash architecture uses a dialogdesign module to produce a dialog structure that de nes the target tool at the editor and window level. Given the dialog structure, a layout-design module completes the window layouts. Dash allows the developer to custom tailor the layout of the knowledgeacquisition tool for its users, and to store such modi cations persistently so that they can be reapplied when the target tool is regenerated. The dash implementation is based on a mapping problem-solving method that de nes the tool-design steps. The Dash Development Environment (dde) is an application-speci c environment that supports the con guration of the mapping method and the maintenance of dash. We have used dash to generate several knowledge-acquisition tools for a broad range of application